All in a day’s work. Matthew McConaughey gained more than 40 pounds for his role in Gold, telling Us Weekly at the Tuesday, January 17, NYC premiere of the film that his family prefers him “fat.”

The Oscar winner, 47, famously lost 38 pounds to play a man dying of AIDS in 2013’s Dallas Buyers Club — a film about real-life advocate Ron Woodroof, who worked around the system trying to get patients medication for the disease — by eating “small amounts” of high-protein, low-carb food, he told Us at the time. His path to pudge, he told Us, was a lot easier by comparison.

“I mean, putting on the weight is more fun,” he told Us on Tuesday. “I was probably more fun at home because I [said] ‘yes’ to everything. I was cooking a lot and we were going out a lot. [My family] probably would prefer fat … I was a real ‘yes’ guy at the time.”

In Gold, McConaughey plays Kenny Wells, a balding, slightly overweight businessman who pairs up with Michael Aosta (Edgar Ramirez) in search of gold in the Indonesian jungle. The film also stars Bryce Dallas Howard and features one scene in which the star pets a live tiger.

“The sweat on me in that scene is not fake,” McConaughey said. “That was me. I was sweating in my boots because the trainer had said, ‘Look, everything should be OK, but he is a meat-eating mammal, and he’s also very curious. If he lunges, I can’t stop the lunge but I can get him off of ya.’ None of that made me feel that secure about it.”

To lose the weight, McConaughey told reporters, he fell back on old standards: “Just diet and exercise and [I] took my time and hoped that it would come off and it did.”

Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves attend the world premiere of "Gold" hosted by TWC-Dimension at AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 theater on January 17, 2017 in New York City.Chance Yeh/FilmMagic
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Not that the Interstellar star was in a rush to shed the pounds. “I think I gave myself a week to kind of fade out, and then I started fasting for a little bit to kind of kick-start [the weight loss],” he said. “But I didn’t stop full turkey. It was too much fun. I wasn’t ready to stop.”